academic sins

From the Times Higher Education: Seven Deadly Sins of the Academy

Two points of interest:

1. possible use with a unit on habitus

2. one item on the list, lust, becomes a great controversy when the writer claims "The fault lies with the females." UH OH.... the folks at Crooked Timber respond here and here. Apparently the author is "a rightwing media don and author of pop ev psych books". Great.

Neiwert vs Goldberg continues

The Doughy One tweets: "Dave Neiwert's a very sad case who thinks that repeating the same dumb argument makes it smarter." Good god, I can't think of a better case against Twitter than how perfect a medium it is for this fool.

Dave responds at C&L:

So this is how Goldberg responds to an actually serious critique.

Evidently, Goldberg thinks that ignoring a sound argument lets you declare victory over it.

Now, just to be clear: Goldberg has never responded to the core of my critique. He's tossed off side issues, but what I have said about Liberal Fascism from the get-go is that its central thesis -- that "properly understood, fascism is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left" -- simply does not have any grounding in, and is indeed refuted by, the actual historical facts about the "political space" which fascism historically occupied.

Really makes me sad...

sex and the dictionary

How sexy words have a hard time getting in the dictionary (By Jesse Sheidlower, Slate.com)

female PUA

Via Pandagon, Caitlin Macrae tries to turn the tables on pick up artists. Interesting results.

link dump

"Micro-scripts" -- a few good ideas in the article but generally pretty superficial. ("Guess who's losing the great phrase face-off" in Boston.com, by Bill Schley. By an author of a new book by the same title.

Some good links from Dave Neiwert on how Liberal Fascism transmitted through the discourse. Sad sad sad. ("Is Conservatism Brain-Dead?")

Finally, an article in Columbia Journalism Review that contemplates why some protests get coverage and some don't. (Teabaggers, astroturfed town hall riots = yes. Protests at a health care CEO's house? No -- "too staged" according to the journalists.)

fascism fail

ORLY tries his hand at Nazi analogies... FAIL. KO takes him down (via Kos). From the transcript:

BILL O’REILLY, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Churchill actually wanted to use poison gas on the Germans, in violation of the Geneva Convention, but was stopped by the British war cabinet. The Royal Air Force killed hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of civilians by targeting non-military sites. And the British operated a number of interrogation centers during and after World War II, including one called the London Cage, where German prisoners were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with death.

Another center was opened in Bad Nenndorf, on German soil, after Churchill left power. It was almost like a concentration camp.

President Obama’s British example was wrong.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: Nope. Sorry. If that were a high school history paper, it would have earned its author a nice round F. It makes Michele Bachmann’s Hoot Smalley spooner-ism from last week look good.

Pretty good, possible use in class for the "how to analogize with history" unit.

(recent) history of american journalism

Walter Pincus calls out colleagues/the industry on failures since Watergate. A good history.

"Newspaper Narcissism" in Columbia Journalism Review.